$ whoami

Brian Racer

~/denver

I build software and the teams that build software. Currently leading engineering at Homebot, where I've grown from writing code to shaping how a team of engineers works, learns, and ships. Eight years and counting.

My background spans the full stack of modern software: application architecture, infrastructure & operations, data pipelines, security, and performance. I've managed fleets of cloud infrastructure, designed distributed systems, built data engineering teams, and guided organizations through the hard parts of scaling a product.

On the side, I own and operate Downbeat Silent Disco, a small event company that turns any space into a dance floor, no speakers required.

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Experience

Homebot
- Director of Engineering 2022 – present Leading the engineering organization: team structure, technical direction, hiring, and the systems and culture that let engineers do their best work. This includes managing a dedicated data engineering team responsible for the pipelines and models that drive Homebot's core intelligence.
- Infrastructure & Data Lead 2018 – 2022 Built and owned the data infrastructure powering Homebot's homeowner intelligence platform: data pipelines, observability, and the systems processing millions of property and market signals for hundreds of thousands of homeowners.
- Senior Software Engineer 2017 – 2018 Joined as an early engineer, contributing across the full stack before moving into infrastructure ownership.
Deny Boredom 2017 – 2021
- Founder A Denver-based venture with a few things under it. Downbeat Silent Disco is an event company that turns any space into a dance floor using wireless headphones, with clients ranging from corporate events to 501(c)(3)s and weddings. Denvertainment was a city guide covering what to do in Denver right now. The Deny Boredom Playbook was a mobile membership app (iOS and Android) offering BOGO deals at bars, restaurants, and venues across Denver. I designed and built the app, the backend API, and the Stripe-powered subscription service.
Aetna / CVS Health 2016 – 2017
- Senior Software Engineer Built an SOA architecture in Ruby and Elixir, including an API gateway that directed traffic over an MQ bus and served millions of requests per day. Led the project delivering Aetna membership data to Apple Wallet. Won first place in a company-wide hackathon by cutting CI pipeline runtimes from 10 minutes to under 30 seconds.
Tilt 2014 – 2016
- Senior Site Reliability Engineer Owned the AWS infrastructure at a YC '13 startup later acquired by Airbnb. Built log management (Logstash, Elasticsearch, Kibana), monitoring and alerting (Nagios, CloudWatch, PagerDuty), and CI/CD pipelines across half a dozen platforms. Maintained strong security and compliance practices while holding credit card data on-site, and shipped a daily digest to engineers aggregating KPIs, security alerts, and system health.
Zaarly 2011 – 2013
- Director of Infrastructure Managed a small SRE team and built the AWS infrastructure that carried a fast-growing startup from a handful of engineers to ~50. Built logging and metrics pipelines (Chef, Sensu, Elasticsearch, Statsd), custom business and system dashboards, and regular tech talks. Diagnosed a critical production memory leak by instrumenting the Ruby MRI interpreter itself in C, work that was later formalized into ObjectSpace.
Jetpack LLC 2007 – 2012
- Founder Co-founded a web security and performance consultancy. Security work included source code audits (PHP, Rails, frontend) for common attack vectors and developer training. Performance work covered caching layers, horizontal scaling, automated provisioning, CDN deployments, and database tuning. Clients included some local Eau Claire institutions: Bon Iver and Volume One, alongside a who's who of early internet: Fark.com, Newgrounds.com, and eBaum's World.
Yaptime 2010 – 2011
- Lead Developer Built a group communication and content sharing platform with real-time chat, location sharing, and a mobile app, essentially a private social network before that was a crowded category.
First Net Impressions 2004 – 2007
- Web Programmer First professional role. Worked across the full LAMP stack with dozens of clients, which is where the security and performance obsessions started.